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It’s called whitespace watermarking and seems to be one of those ideas that keeps getting re-invented. It’s used a lot, particularly in HTML where the rendering
by staplung 4y ago
It’s called whitespace watermarking and seems to be one of those ideas that keeps getting re-invented. It’s used a lot, particularly in HTML where the rendering hides the identifying spaces. It can help you figure out if someone is scrapping your content.
- greggsy 4y agoMargaret Thatcher did this in the 80’s to help identify who was leaking cabinet documents to the press. I recall a story about Jobs tracking down leakers in his own executive suite by telling each of them a slightly different things in private. Not sure if it worked, but it can be a very effective deterrent.
- amelius 4y ago> Margaret Thatcher did this in the 80’s to help identify who was leaking cabinet documents to the press. Surely the extra whitespace would disappear in the DTP systems used by the press?
- egman_ekki 4y agoThey could use typos in different words, though, right?
- 9991 4y agoOr synonyms, or alternate grammar that’s functionally equivalent. Lots of better ways that are completely concealed, unless you see multiple drafts.
- onion2k 4y agoNot if the papers printed photos of the docs.
- thathndude 4y agoThis is why any reputable journalist/leaker takes the information and reproduces it prior to any dissemination (hopefully destroying the original source material).
- biztos 4y agoWouldn’t the “leakee” then be able to say you just made it up?
- jacobsenscott 4y agoYes. But they'll say that anyway, even if you publish the document in full. This is why a trusted free press matters, and why authoritarians work so hard to undermine it.
- avgcorrection 4y agoA trusted and free press huh. In what works of fiction can I read about those?
- hedora 4y agoAny historical text covering media ownership rules in the US prior to the mid 90’s would cover it. If it must be fictional, try the original superman.
- jacobsenscott 4y agoFox News is mostly fictional stories about the free press.
- kuschku 4y agoAnd this is why the media often can't actually show the original sources.
- MengerSponge 4y agoSee how the Intercept absolutely screwed Reality Winner
- xdavidliu 4y agoThe Jobs story sounds quite similar to what Tyrion Lannister did to identify leaks in Game of Thrones. https://youtu.be/Di8Z7rJ9vnI https://youtu.be/Di8Z7rJ9vnI
- prepend 4y agoTyrions plot has a flaw in that it’s three versions of the same story. If two or three betray him, he won’t know and he’ll reveal to the queen that something is afoot. He should have used different stories.
- rocketbop 4y agoHe did use different stories, he tells each one something different.
- stavros 4y agoBut it's a version of the same story. If the queen hears that he's planning to marry Marcella off to Dorne and Theon, she'll know that something's up.
- prepend 4y agoIf Pycelle tells Cersei Dorne and Varys says Greyjoy and Littlefinger says Vale then that’s a problem as Cersei won’t act on the information. It also might make her suspect misinformation as there are three different values coming to her at once and she’ll have to deduce what’s more likely that all three informants are lying, or misunderstand, or Tyrion fed them bad info. Much more likely to have three independent stories so that the traitors will be revealed even if there are multiples. In the current scenario, if Varys and Littlefinger snitch then Tyrion won’t know because Cersei will hear Greyjoy and Vale and not reveal what she knows to Tyrion because it conflicts as Myrcella can’t be married to two different groups. The better scenario would be something like “Myrcella marries Dorne to Pycelle; 1,000 ships sent to Westeros to Varys; I’m appointing Jaime as lord of casterly rock” then each betrayal could be known. If Varys and Littlefinger snitch in this scenario Cersei will look into ships and casterly rock and reveal the betrayers to Tyrion.
- prepend 4y agoI worked with someone who would tell me very precise weird personal details (eg, “the left side of my mouth can’t taste”). I found it odd because they weren’t really pertinent and seemed really unique that I’ve never heard of anyone else with the condition. I suspected he did this to try to determine who they can trust when he would remark that people were liars or not trustworthy and one time a coworker told me a completely different weird detail about them. I never got a chance to ask them about this technique before we stopped working together.
- david422 4y agoSo was he like ... hey bud, don't tell anyone this, but ... "the left side of my mouth can't taste" Because I can't figure out how this would be helpful in any other context.
- prepend 4y agoHe never said not to tell anyone but he brought up several such details while we were working together. The information wasn’t really helpful for anything in that it wasn’t relevant to our work (making software). I never revealed the info because it was said in confidence. But we weren’t really that close so it stood out to me. My example was made up but the actual factoids were about medical issues and bodily functions. It wasn’t creepy or anything just not something I would want widely known.
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoThat sounds like a terrible workplace in general.
- BurningFrog 4y agoTrue. But also very interesting!
- prepend 4y agoNothing is perfect and there were trade offs. This person was really smart so the stuff we made was interesting. I wouldn’t want to work in that org again but I’d gladly work with that individual.
- nailer 4y agoLikewise Coleen Rooney, a football player's wife, did this to unmask a gossip leaker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagatha_Christie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagatha_Christie
- bloak 4y agoThere's also something similar in "The human factor" by Graham Greene, a good spy story.
- enraged_camel 4y agoThe trick is actually very, very old. Mapmakers used to add very small and intentional "mistakes" to their maps so that they could identify who was copying their work (because they would copy the mistakes along with all the legit parts of the map).
- simiones 4y agoIt's pretty well known that map makers do this, adding non-existent small localities to detect when someone is blindly copying their work.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoSame with dictionary makers, they will insert some credible looking made-up words here and there. Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
- rolph 4y agoi wonder how many people have died or had life changing experiences, because they thought there would be a village, but found only rocks and bushes there.
- Firmwarrior 4y agoIt definitely caused someone to meet a bad end in "The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zikduruqe 4y agoI used to work in a laboratory where we tested pre-production cell phones (this was before the iPhone...). Different OEMs would send us sample devices with different fonts on the keypad, or with little blemishes on the keypad, or would put little subtle cosmetic changes to devices to catch leakers. Funny when you would see devices pop up on the internet with these little things, and wonder who lost their contracts/jobs/etc/... When Palm was creating the Pre, we had some security dude come to our lab to show us how to securely store, transport, test and inventory devices. It was crazy.
- jimmySixDOF 4y agoI remember coming across these pirated DVDs etc where they had some kind of Academy watermarks from pre release or intros that were supposed to be give aways as to the source path for smoke testing.
- colejohnson66 4y ago> I recall a story about Jobs tracking down leakers in his own executive suite by telling each of them a slightly different things in private. Supposedly, even today, Apple will assign employees (especially new ones) fake projects in an effort to weed out leakers.
- iudqnolq 4y agoBoris Johnson planned to do it, but bragged in the press about the plan before implementing it.
- theCrowing 4y agoyeah, the biggest case might have been Google vs genius. There are also more elaborate things done for documents with a 500 company we rolled out fonts with slightly different hinting to determine in which ring the leaks were happening.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- haasted 4y agoGenius used a similar technique to check whether Google was scraping their lyrics. Apostrophes in selected song lyrics spelled out "red-handed" in morse code. https://www.pcmag.com/news/genius-we-caught-google-red-handed-stealing-lyrics-data https://www.pcmag.com/news/genius-we-caught-google-red-hande...
- no_carrier 4y agoInteresting... Google caught out Bing stealing search results a number of years before that - https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying... I guess engineers at Google have too short of tenure to actually remember the precedent.
- pb7 4y ago> Google blames the issue on third-party licensing partners. "The lyrics displayed in information boxes on Google Search are licensed from a variety of sources and are not scraped from sites on the web," the company said in a statement. Did you read the link?
- salawat 4y agoNon-breaking whitespace/other non-rendered characters can disrupt this type of technique. It can also be rendered moot by photograph, transcription, paraphrasing, etc... Hell, even a re-encode/format change, or stripping of format info can moot the entire premise. I welcome Musk to demonstrating his own psychosis/neurosis. It doesn't really speak to any fundamental cleverness. Furthermore, were I a journalist receiving such material, I'd damn well make sure to change how I communicated it enough to neutralize attempts at such watermarking, simply because I know people are pre-disposed to such acts as he did. In fact, if you're going for maximum Discordian Malcontent high score, and you're confident you're operating under such scrutiny, neutralize a copy you leak, then carefully orchestrate the planting of false trails to keep the spook wannabes chasing their tails, which can end up blowing back on the orchestrator for waste of resources. This works better with a larger team though where Spartacus dynamics start kicking in. Sample size 1 tends to leave sufficient metadata from neutral parties to rehome in on a common perpetrator. This is why labor organization scares the living shit out of people like Musk, and other large holders of capital/abusive management types. Info asymmetry, fear, and disunity are some of their most potent weapons. Wisdom tends to prevail on the side of "don't do shit somebody'd find leak worthy, and you won't have this problem".
- grishka 4y agoGood HTML parser libraries follow that part of the spec and collapse multiple spaces into one.
- bogomipz 4y agoYes and similarly many printers and photo copiers have something called MIC - machine identification codes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code
- rcarmo 4y agoA couple of corporations back, I got fed up with a corporate team who re-used my slides "creatively" without attribution and added the words "rabid squirrels" in white text to both the master slides and a few diagrams. We used EMC's Team Rooms, and it was quite fun to run a full-text search across our tenant a few months later.